Chapter twenty
Rook
Tuesday. Game day.
I got to the rink at six because I couldn’t lie still. Varga slept the way he sleeps when something good is coming, flat on his stomach with one arm hanging off the bed, and I was on my side next to him until I heard the first birds of the morning. Then I got up, made coffee in the dark kitchen, and drove to the Performance Center.
I was on the ice before anyone else, even before Cross. I took the first lap slowly and let the cold seep down into the bottom of my lungs.
By tonight it would be complete.
I kept turning the thought over in my head, and it didn’t scare me anymore. We had a plan. Light skate this morning. Then the game tonight.
We’d tell the room first, before the game, and then the world in a statement after. It would be our words, with our timing. I’d sit down with Kovac the morning after and give him the full story. We had every piece in place.
Easton’s text still echoed in the back of my head.Spend it on the next one.
I wanted time to skip ahead to the moments before the game.
The Zamboni doors opened at the far end and the equipment kids clumped out in their shower sandals. I left the ice and went to my stall, waiting for the rest of the team.
Dahl was early. He was two stalls down on the other side, dressed in a suit.
It registered in a low key. A game-day blazer at eight in the morning meant a healthy scratch. Trier would be on the second pair, and Mikkelsen would get more time. Somebody had to come out, and that somebody was a thirty-two-year-old depth defenseman on a one-year deal.
He was me at twenty-one, except I was climbing then, and now he was sliding. I never lived in that territory.
He held his tie in his hands. The winger they’d brought up Friday walked in. “Morning,” he said in a cheerful voice.
“You’re up because somebody’s hurt,” Dahl said. “That’s the only reason any of us are ever here. Don’t get comfortable.”
The kid laughed uncomfortably. It was an unsolicited comment from a man who’d found the one person in the room more disposable than himself and wanted him to feel it.
I’d dressed beside Dahl for a season and a half, and I couldn’t have told you his hometown. Half the stalls had turned over since I joined the Ironhawks. I still knew the core of the team cold. Cross’s silences were readable and Pratt’s goalie superstitions familiar. Dahl was no more distinctive to me than a mild breeze off the lake. The same for four or five others I’d never engaged in genuine conversation.
The Rook and Varga Show started up when I began taping my stick.
Varga arrived mid-monologue. He pinned Mikkelsen to the wall. ”—no, listen, listen, because this matters. The man is fromMaine. You know what they eat in Maine? Fish. For breakfast. A whole fish looking at you.“ He steered the kid toward his stall by the shoulder. “So when Rook tells you the place on Damen is overrated, you have to run the comment through a filter. You have to ask yourself: has this man, one time in his life, correctly identified a sandwich? And the answer, Rafe—“ a beat “—is no.”
I didn’t look up. He knew I’d heard him from the door.
Trier arrived complaining about the cat sitter and then the lineup. Then he got around to me.
“Old married couple,” he said. He jerked his chin toward my stall and then Varga’s. “You two. I told Kovac that. You fight about the thermostat.” He was delighted with himself. “Twenty years from now you’ll be in a cabin somewhere fighting over the duvet.”
He meant it as a harmless poke. The words were a little on the nose, but we were just a day out. I responded in a deadpan tone. “He’s wrong about the thermostat. We don’t fight about the thermostat.”
Laughter bounced around the room. Trier’s joke should have died there.
Dahl, in his bitterness over the scratch, picked it up. “You ever actually watch them, though?” He hitched a ride on Trier’s chirp, and his tone turned dark. “Like watch them. The married thing.” A beat. He looked at me. “Do you ever wonder if it’s not a bit?”
Nobody laughed.
Dahl took the silence from the room as a cue to keep going. “I’m just saying.” He spread his hands. “Neither one of you’s ever—and you live where, Rook? Have you ever had anybody over? Varga’s got that place in the city nobody’s seen the inside of.” He laughed briefly, inviting the room to come along with him. “I’m asking. It’s a question. Guys ask questions.”
“What is your problem?” Trier asked.
“I don’t have a problem. It’s a compliment. We hear the joking, but there’s never an actual bad word. That’s a real partnership. I’d kill for chemistry like that with my girlfriend.”
